Microsoft Talks Evolution of Windows Server 8

Bill Laing, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Server and Cloud Division, provided insight into the planning process of Server 8 and what Microsoft hopes to deliver with its latest Server release.

The excitement that Microsoft's Server 8 team generated over the upcoming release of the latest iteration of its OS was infectious. Yet, the man leading the Server 8 effort resonates nothing less than calm, cool confidence.

Bill Laing, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Server and Cloud Division, is responsible for managing all elements of Windows Azure and the Windows Server platform. On the first day of the Windows Server 8 Reviewers' Workshop—a three-day event where about 35 tech journalists were to be formally introduced to Server 8, I got the chance to speak with Laing before he kicked off the event as the keynote speaker.

PCMag: Can you discuss the planning process with Windows Server 8?Laing: We've taken a lot from Azure, about running a cloud server—[and] how we think about Windows Server and how we planned it. Servers are typically in the market for five to eight years; Server 2003, 2008 is still out there. So when you do a new release you ar looking at five to eight years. This is the developer preview and the reason for doing a release at this point is to work with the software community and the hardware community—to make sure they are ready when we finally ship. We're not encouraging IT pros at this time to deploy it. They might do some evaluations. We have TAP (Technology Adoption Program) partners; they do deployments. But we want to ensure we have the right device drivers, we have the right infrastructure tools, like backup agents, anti-virus.

PCMag: Is this one of the biggest changes to Windows Server since perhaps NT to 2000?Laing: We've done a lot of work to focus on giving Server Manager a new tool. Server Manager, we think, is fairly evolutionary. Many of the tools are still available underneath. We want people to be able to manage many machines from one. Our goal was to make it a natural evolution for people. I think that it's probably the broadest [of changes]. We've added more features than our several last releases. It's a big release of Windows Server. And it's in every area—file system storage, clustering, virtualization, remote access…

PCMag: What will the upgrade path to Server 8 be? Will it run on the same hardware as 2008 R2?Laing: Typically we find that most customers upgrade when they buy new hardware. Our goal is to be able to run on existing hardware. So we will support the same hardware Server 2008 R2 runs on. From 2008 to 2008 R2 we worked to keep the specs the same.

PCMag: Can you discuss the Server 8 development, goals, and new capabilities?Laing: We surveyed 26,000 customers. We did a lot of work based on what we were hearing from customers. We spent $10 million on surveys. Customers know there's a journey to the cloud. No one knows whether it's two years or five. Some people want to build a cloud, some people want to connect to the cloud. Even if you are a small business, backing up your server is an attractive thing. Or, you may be a service provider wanting to build a cloud and offering it as a service. It's about the ability to give people a high availability environment at a lower price point and software to automate many of the management tasks, and let people offer continuous services.

Another area is claims-based access. It's possible to classify files automatically based on their content or either what directory they are in. So if a file has "Microsoft confidential" in it, that could be tagged and only full-time employees would be given access. We call it claims based access. Another pillar is around the development environment. People want to be able to build applications for a single server, for public and private clouds.

PCMag: How long until we see a completely cloud-based datacenter as the norm?Laing: New technologies typically don't completely replace existing technologies. They usually create new opportunities. IBM still sells mainframes, which were started in the 1960s. There's been this evolution. Cloud allows you to do things you couldn't do before and reach more people. We expect many standardized workloads will be available online, Office 365 is an example. There are particular cases where what you do does not differentiate your company. You're probably not more successful as a company running your own email. I think it will happen workload by workload and dependent on what your industry is.

Samara Lynn has nearly twenty years experience in Information Technology; most recently as IT Director at a major New York City healthcare facility. She has a Bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College, several technology certifications, and she was a tech editor for the CRN Test Center.
With an extensive, hands-on background in deploying and managing Microsoft Windows infrastructures and networking, she was included in Black Enterprise's "20 Black Women in Tech You Need to Follow on Twitter," and received the 2013 Small Business Influencer Top 100 Champions...
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